Somewhere on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula between the towns of Aberdeen and Forks flows a river called the Queets. Highway 101 crosses the Queets near what remains of the indigenous settlement that used to exist along its lower reaches.The onslaught of logging and other commercial development interests displaced its native people and decimated the area’s resources.

The history of deforestation and extinction or endangerment of native species (including people) on the greater Peninsula is astounding; it’s sufficient to say that one of the most resource-rich and unique regions in the United States has been exploited in some cases beyond recovery.

This is hardly apparent gazing across the Sound from Red Square at the silhouette of stately Mount Olympus, and it may even be hard to imagine when the overwhelming greenness of the Peninsula is contrasted with the more familiar grayness of Seattle.

But the environmental threat to watersheds like the Queets is real even with today’s progressive environmentalist attitude, and the way we manage the last of our wilderness lands has important implications for the fate of our environment at large and, by extension, our values, identity and fate as a society.

The prevailing force on the Peninsula is water. Several inches of rain per day on the western face of the Peninsula during the rainy season and an extensive network of glaciers at the core of the Olympics keep thousands of miles of rivers flowing year-round.

The first motion to protect the Peninsula was made in the 1930s with the creation of Olympic National Park. Covering only the central region of the peninsula, however, it left many of the lowland river valleys open to further exploitation. One most-of-the-way exception was the Queets.

As other watersheds continued to suffer the effects of irresponsible development, the lower Queets was protected from development by a narrow corridor of National Park land intended to preserve at least one Peninsula watershed from mountains to ocean. The Queets would stand as a sort of memorial to the wilderness that once covered the entire Peninsula.

But the Queets Valley wasn’t entirely pristine and protected; over-fishing, illegal hunting, and deforestation of adjacent lands along tributary streams continued to threaten the health of the ecosystem.

One factor impacting fish in particular was an access road that traveled half the length of the Queets up from Highway 101. It provided vehicle access to fishermen, boaters, and campers at Sams Rapids, a vitally important spawning grounds for the Queets’ fish.

Where salmon and steelhead once swam unimpeded after passing tribal fishing nets near the river’s mouth, the fish were now subjected to additional harvest pressures and spawning habitat degradation where it mattered most.

These factors in concert with external factors like poor ocean conditions and commercial over-harvest brought the Queets to the winter of 2006 with only a fraction of the spawning population of winter steelhead it had once supported.

Then, a reprieve: the Queets flooded in grand fashion that January, washing a large portion of the access road into the river six miles below Sams Rapids. The flood effectively blocked vehicle access, restoring protection to the Queets above the washout.

The rainforest has since begun to reclaim the campground at Sams Rapids.

Of course, this ending would be too happy, and rather than leaving it at that, area fishing guides and other special interest groups have protested the road closure, demanding that their “right” to access (and exploit) the upper Queets by vehicle be acknowledged. As a result, Olympic National Park has proposed a rerouting of access to Sams Rapids via the reopening of long-closed Forest Service roads.

In essence, the park has submitted that vehicle access to an area originally intended as protected wilderness be restored at the expense of wilderness protection.

Mercifully, the park is accepting public comment on the proposal through January 31, and if enough individuals protest, vehicle access will likely remain closed.

The question remains, of course, why should we care? Most of us will never visit the Queets, and in fact protesting access will keep it difficult to do so.

The answer, like the problem, is complex. Far-reaching ecological importance of healthy salmon and steelhead populations aside, the most important reason to care may be less tangible.

The devaluation of salmon from the Pacific Northwest Indian perspective (equals of mankind) to the modern perspective (a commodity, or, at best, a quaint artifact of Northwest history) is remarkable, and it is clearly reflected in the decimation of fish and habitat over the last 200 years where Pacific Northwest Indians were able to sustain a healthy and productive relationship for several thousand years.

Keeping Queets access closed, then, is symbolically important; it would demonstrate recognition of the need to protect what we have left of what our region once had. If those who enjoy the outdoors cannot put away self-serving interests to preserve even one piece of it, we may reach the day when there are no more outdoors to enjoy.

Submit comments on Queets access by January 31 to: olym_ea@nps.gov

Reach columnist Andrew Brown at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.